His Majesty the King’s gold medal to Tiainen

Hanna Tiainen from the Department of Biomaterials at IKO will receive the award for her PhD-work.

Hanna Tiainen, foto: Jonas Wengenroth, OD/UiO.

The research fellow is awarded His Majesty the King’s gold medal for her PhD thesis «Ceramic TiO2 Scaffolds for Bone Repair» on the grounds that it is “focused and based on groundbreaking work in bone repair by the use of ceramic TiO2 which is one of the areas of priority at the Faculty of Dentistry”.

Maybe a visit to the Royal Palace

Tiainen was attending a congress in Spain last week and had a limited internet access . Because of that, she first heard the news from someone else: - Since I don’t have a smart phone my colleague got to know before me. And I just couldn’t believe him when he told me I got the King’s gold medal.

The award means that Tiainen will obtain an audience with the King. But she admits she hasn’t thought too much about that yet: - Of course it is prestigious. And it is a great honor to the whole Department of Biomaterials. All of us work hard and we publish articles in acknowledged journals. It’s very nice to receive an appreciation for that.

An important contribution to the field

The King’s gold medal is awarded every other year at the Faculty of Dentistry to an “outstanding, younger researcher for a scientific work evaluated at the University of Oslo”.

The faculty itself nominates the candidates for the award. The candidates are shortlisted for a work that is “acknowledged as an important contribution to the field’s research literature”.

Tiainens PhD-thesis from 2013 contains seven peer evaluated and published works and she is the lead author in six of them. Among these, the post doctor has published one of the articles she is the lead author of in Acta Biomaterialia in 2012. That journal has an impact factor of 6.0.

The award ceremony will take place at the University of Oslo’s annual celebration on September 2.